


The Ghost

by Hawkbringer



Category: Meet the Robinsons (2007)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Abrupt Ending, Alternate Selves, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Flirting, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Homoeroticism, Kissing, Lewis and Cornelius as separate people, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Men Crying, Mental Breakdown, Multi, No Underage Sex, Partial Nudity, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Pseudo-Incest, Rough Draft, Sharing a Bed, Swearing, Time travel weirdness, Whining, baby-mama franny, changing the future, first-person author's commentary left in, having your future son as your wingman doesnt work so well when you like him better, visual distortions caused by messing with time-travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:22:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25536520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawkbringer/pseuds/Hawkbringer
Summary: After their first big adventure together, Wilbur continues, ill-advisedly, to travel to the past and visit Lewis Robinson in his new and happy home. He does so often enough that things begin to shift around him when he goes 'back to the future'... Eventually, his home-time changes so much that he stops going back at all. (written immediately after my first viewing of the movie in 2015)
Relationships: Lewis | Cornelius Robinson & Franny Robinson, Lewis | Cornelius Robinson/Wilbur Robinson
Kudos: 5





	1. Background Plot Bunnies

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter is more of a rough-draft compilation of ideas, the second is a more fully-fleshed-out story.

I kind of /do/ want to see Meet the Robinsons again, now that I know the kicker. Maybe I'll make a map of how everyone's related, too. I could /totally/ see the relationship potential between Lewis and Wilbur ...why the hell did he pick /Wilbur/ as a name for his poor kid? Only kid, from the looks of it. 

Oh, and his mom was /so/ damn skinny. I liked that she was this weird kid obsessed with frogs. That kind of made up for the wasp-waisted madonna she was later. 

And the thing about time travel and changing the future was interesting. Because, hell, maybe since it was Cornelius' machine, it's all how time changes from /his/ perspective and as /he/ goes through it from his own perspective. That would make sense as to why... No, cuz Goob is able to change the future-world into Doris-ville. I thought it was pretty cool that by declaring he would never invent the Helper Hat, Doris, since she was from the future, just /disintegrated/. 

I like the multi-verse theroem. I wonder if time machines from /other/ times could affect the future-world as it was. Lewis being able to go into the future.... that only happened because the world had already played out as it normally did, without Bowler Hat Guy's intervention. Without Doris loosening those screws, the thing would have worked! And set him on the path to greatness. Maybe would have had the sciencey-mom adopt him, too. And Goob festered (like, really festered. Eugh.) and only after he was icky did Doris meet him (I forget how that happened. Oh, Goob had left the derilect building to go throw eggs and toilet paper at Cornelius' HQ, and Doris had just escaped. Cornelius, the one on the business trip, had never met his son /before/ he was born. Sure didn't seem like it. He didn't /remember/ it when he was first introduced or anything, didn't smack his head and say, 'Dang! That was /today/!?')

In the time-universe-stream (space-time continuum?) that unfolded /after/ the whole time-capsule fiasco, there is no Doris, and Cornelius is probably a lot better at making the first time machine, in any case. Hmm, would Wilbur's dad actually be the same person as Cornelius at 40? (I decided, they're different, and Corny is around age 40.)

So really, Cornelius Wilbur's dad, would /not/ be the same as Lewis, Wilbur's lover whom he keeps going back and visiting frequently. The funny thing is, they're totally like, the same age, and they'd keep aging at the same rate biologically, and Wilbur doesn't use the time machine to go back 10 minutes, then back /again/ and /again/, like Hermione does in book 3, which would age her twice as fast. 

We hit a snag when it comes to how future-Goob was able to rewrite the future-world wholesale and entirely in one storm-of-ominous-proportions.... 

When it was becoming clear that Lewis was spending far more time with Wilbur than he was with Fran, the frog-girl he was supposed to marry... something would shift. I'm deciding that it's less of a storm in this case, and more a settling in of fog. Slowly, not in one horrendous microburst-style-storm, but in like a drizzle over days.

\---

Maybe they're, like, teenagers, and after a fight with her, or a time she doesn't answer Lewis' text because she's clearly seeing the route he's going down with that /friend/ of his with the weird haircut... Wil would come and visit him, and he'd report something weird. A ghost had appeared in his house that day. 

"I mean, the /hair/ was different, which, I can't imagine ever changing /this/.... but I got the feeling it was actually... /me/." Cor just raised his eyebrow at him. 

"No, from the future!" He raises both eyebrows. "Or... the past... Ohhh, this is embarssing." 

Cor blinked. "Embarassing? Not /confusing/? Why?" 

Wil lifts his head and looks Cor in the eyes imploringly. "It was me from /this/ time period. Like if I came here and /lived/ here, and then wound up living in the house from /my/ time thirty years from /this/ time." Cor is only able to follow all that due to his previous sojourn into Wilbur's time, four years, three months, and 11 days ago now. Not that he's counting. He tilts his head. 

"Soooo.... What? You think you're about to make the decision to live in this time, er, full-time?" He looks far too happy at that prospect and Wil groans, slapping a hand to his face. 

"See, this? /This/ is the reason my /existence/ is currently in danger!" 

Cor puts up a hand to silence him. "What are you /talking/ about?" 

Wil's hands start flailing about, attempting to bolster his point. "See, see, it's... If I choose to live here /now/, then I'll drop out of my /own/ time-stream entirely. Which won't be so bad for anybody but /me/. Oh, and mom and dad. They'll miss me a lot." He chews on his lip at that. "But, you know, fuck em. I'm almost 18! They can't tell me what to do!" 

Cor rolls his eyes. "I'm your /dad/, son." Wil pouts. He hates it when Cor pulls that tone. But he has to admit... it's kind of hot. "And I know /I/ would pull you back into my timestream in a heartbeat if it's where I thought you belonged." 

Wil's face collapses, slowly enough that it makes a sick sort of sense to Cor, who hastens to revise. 

"No! No, no, no-no-no-no-no. /I/ think you belong here. I love having you here! It's just that /he/ thinks the same thing about you and /his/ timeline. See?" 

Wilbur nods sadly. "I think I get it, I just..." He suddenly pops his head up. "Hey, did anything happen with Franny?" He's been terribly interested in maintaining Franny and Corny's relationship, since, as he puts it, his life is on the line. 

Cor shakes his head helplessly. "Uhh...no? She didn't call back, but..."

Wilbur takes him by the shoulders and shouts in his face. "She didn't... call... /back/? Cornee-eee! That must be the /reason/! I'm surprised I'm not fading away right this second!" He starts patting himself down all over as if frightened he is about to effervesce as he did once before. 

Cor grabs his hands and holds onto them to keep them still and force Wil to focus on him. "Wil? Wilbur, no. Lookit me." 

Wil does, helplessly, hyperventilating. He's working himself into a fit again and Lucille and Bud are used to shouts of laughter floating down from Cornelius' observatory-slash-lab-slash-bedroom, but hysteria and pain are likely to draw at least /some/ concern. 

"You need to go back." 

Wil's mouth drops into a pained and comedic jawdrop of disbelief but before he can squeak in protest, Corny talks over him. "Go, and then come back in like 5 seconds if you want ..."

(note - time travel movies often have this for dramatic effect, but really, you'd be able to spend five years in wherever, and then come back to /seconds/ after you left, if the machine was functioning properly. It wouldn't /require/ you to return at a point five years from the time at which you left. That's bullshit. Makes for good continuity, but immediate return also has a kind of smug-knowing-smile-exchange happy ending goin' on.) 

"... but you need to go talk to your dad. You need to grill him about this particular point in his past. If he doesn't remember you through my eyes, the way I'm looking at you now... Then we're safe. Then it turns out I've built a /dimension hopper/ for you, actually." 

It's sitting just a few feet away from them. It's one of the first things Wilbur helped him build. It's /stationary/, which made the circuitry far less complicated than the flying version. Cor wonders why he even wanted to make it fly in the first place. It's /so/ much easier to /lose/ that way!

\------------------

Maybe things start to shift around /Wil/. Would he be the only one to notice because he's maintaining some sort of personality by being around Corny? Nah, he wouldn't get that lucky. He'd be erased just as fast. It's a dimension-hopper, clearly. Maybe it's even attuned to /thoughts/, since Lewis cracked the hippocampus at goddamn 12-and-five-sixths or however old he was when he did that. Yeah, cuz Wil says he's 13 and older than him. Sure, okay. So he cracks the hippocampus at 12-and-change, he's /gonna/ have some psychically-sensitive inventions after that, he's /got/ to. 

So once he and Wil figure out it's a dimension-hopper, Wil stops freakin' out and goes to live his own life in this dimension with Corny, and they both go and visit future-corny and the family for reunions and shit. /That/ version of the family would understand the weirdness of dimension-hopping, at least. Wil sometimes can't get over that the Cor he knows is not the one that everyone else in his universe remembers. 

Perhaps, after a while, they stop going to visit that old family. Wil's old family. Because it's just too painful. Or weird. Too confusing. No one else in Wil's new family /knows/. They don't know they go /off-planet/, essentially, when they go to visit Wil's family. 

Maybe one day, they tell them. That Wil is from another dimension that an older Cornelius built a portal to and Wil fucked with it and that's how he met Lewis at age 12 and, well, they've just kind of stayed together ever since. They leave out the part where Wil is Cor's /son/ from that dimension because, well, they're not going to be making any /babies/ anytime soon, now, are they? No one will genetically suffer from any union of /that/ couple. They really don't need to freak about incest. Besides, the two look almost nothing alike. Seriously. He got a ton of his looks from his mom. I'm sure they'd be hella similar in other ways, but... They were certainly raised differently. In different times. There'd always be that weird time-gap between them that would prevent their interaction from becoming too ingrown. Perhaps that's part of the reason both of them want to drag in as many of the extended family as possible. To keep /them/ on their toes.)

(See, Lewis was able to erase Doris, and that horrid future, just by deciding to. He could totally erase Wilbur, standing right in front of him, by deciding to follow his heart and spur Franny. Weird. Wait. Would future-cor fucking future-franny make a literal clone of then-Wil? They'd be raising a literal clone of his lover. No, not his clone, his literal /past self/. Except, it'd be the whole family. Young will's memories of his mother would be kind of replaced by his memories of Wilbur. Which, young Will has /got/ to be named something else. 

Cor or Wil would put a hand on Franny's shoulder while she poured over some obscure website and say, "Francesca, darling." Which would get his attention because he never calls her by her full name. "You cannot call the baby /Wilbur/." (Well, actually, /that/ wouldn't happen, because she'd know she was being a cum-dump for will and cor, duh. Actually, Cor might smile and turn to Wil and say... OMIFUCKINGGOD, no. We CANNOT have Wilbur fucking his own mom to make a baby for him and Cor. No. Not happening. Never fucking mind.) 

Okay, so maybe they go to Franny while she's chatting with them on the vid-phone, or, hell, they're actually sitting around planning when Cor will fuck her or something and Cor's blushing up to his hair, of /course/ he is, and that's when they insist, "We will /not/ name him Wilbur." And she squints at him and goes, "Hell, no. Why would you do that to the poor kid? Wilbur Junior. Sheesh." So they end up picking Odin as the kid's name and when the kid is born with blond hair, all three of them think they've made the right choice. 

\---

See, dimension-hopping. Maybe something weird happened and Wil starts to fade. See, this could be a /totally/ star-crossed lovers /super/ depressing, mood-wrecking piece. But womb-rentals are a thing, so it doesn't /have/ to be. 

But the memories would warp. Perhaps it gets to a point where Wil literally cannot go home. No, wait, that doesn't make any sense. He should be able to go anywhere he wants to, if it's a dimension-hopper. 

Maybe it /is/ a time-traveling thing, originally. Then they decide they want to be together in Cor's new life he's building which includes Francesca as a baby-mama AND Wil as a significant other. So they work on making the time-traveler a dimension-hopper. 

Then they each go to future-Cor and ask for his blessing. Well, no, say young-Cor goes to future-Cor, and young-Wil goes to future-Franny, his mother. They want to observe the declaration, of course they do. And Lucille and Bud of Cor's new life do, as well. 

The two of them refuse to risk both timestreams by bringing both families in to either time. They decide to do the ceremony in the past, since if Wil evaporates before Cor's eyes, he at /least/ has the chance to go back to Franny and, well, /make/ him again. It wouldn't be the same life, but it would be Wil, at least. 

Wil, of course, feels weird about that, but Cor reasons that if they decide it in the future, the very ground they're standing on might warp. Wil might have to watch his dad disappear. Wil shakes his head and argues that if they're going to alter Wil's past anyway, by making him part of Cor's life before he has any right to be, then if it's successful, they could still visit future versions of themselves who never knew anything different. Cor wonders if they can warp their minds, their memories, with things they say to each other at any moment. 

Lol, what if they, in their childishness, refuse to own up to either timestream and hide, literally under some blankets, when they make their vows. I mean, they're like, 16. They can be as childish as I want.

\---------

They stay there, quivering, Corny holding Wilbur's hands as tightly as he possibly can, fearing his entire essence is about to dissolve away in a shower of light. 

They breathe, so harshly, into the silence, that Cor holds his breath at one point to make sure he can still hear /Wilbur's/ breathing. That's when Wilbur, who had been listening just as closely, gasps in horror and opens his eyes. His gasp causes Corny to jerk his eyes open and they frighten each other with their shivers. 

Then they laugh, they laugh /so/ long and loud because he is /here/, they are both /here/, still under these covers, still safe. Then they start to get paranoid about lifting the covers /off/, because what if daylight will be the cause of Wil's destruction? 

And then it's like, /Franny/ of all people who comes in and rips the covers off and the two of them shout - naw, say it's Lucille, trying to get them down for dinner - but they're okay and so they scramble to put their clothes back on and both of them forget that Cor's mom hadn't really /known/, and that having her two adopted sons scramble out from under the covers half-dressed in joyous abandon, clinging to each other's arms as they pull sweatpants on from a mismatched pile on the floor is /not/ the way they would have wanted to tell her. 

And they run off nearly as soon as dinner's done, shouting their appreciation and still deliriously happy, before skidding to a stop in front of the time-portal. They hold hands as they calibrate it, working like two halves of a whole, take two simultaneous deep breaths, and jump. They don't need to jump, of course, walking works perfectly fine as well. 

They land in the Observatory, of course, since that's where the portal's other side is, and Cor immediately frowns as he turns in a circle. Things are /not/ exactly as he remembers them from his first visit up here. All later visits /had/ been confined to the lower floors. Things may have changed since - 

"Ah!" They whirl to face the maker of the sound. It's Cornelius, Wilbur's dad, most definitely, but he looks a few years older to Lewis, the way he did when Wil last saw him. It is /such/ a manic relief. They chat with him, ask him if he's noticed anything different recently, and he shakes his head with knit brows. "You wanna ask everyone else?" Because that's usually how such investigations with the boys go. 

They do, they reply, and go speeding down the stairs, questioning everyone they meet. Wilbur, in particular, is emphatically relieved to see his mother and her assorted siblings and their brood. Lewis guiltily realizes they might have erased her presence in this house, even if they didn't erase Wilbur himself. Wil is only relieved in this manner until a tall, dark-haired man neither of them recognize walks in, shouts amicably to Fran, and slings an arm around her, hugging her to his side for a moment before glancing down at the kids and cheerfully shouting, "Oh hey! It's mini-me!" 

And it is. It is Wilbur 30 years from now that stands before them, practically a carbon-copy of his mother, who stands beside him at almost exactly his same age. Wilbur the younger stands with his mouth open.

It turns out they weren't exactly expecting his arrival - how could they, neither of them /remember/ this sojourn from their past lives? The second they go /back/, things will turn out differently, of course. They get a little bit into the mechanics of time travel and memories when Cornelius talks about the first places he'd traveled back to. The future he'd gone forward to, (which he remembers now, the way older-corny didn't in the movie) was not the one that he was living into existence. He knew that, at least. He changed it, because, as he remembered the Cornelieus who would be about 70 if he were reachable now, that man had never met his older self, while /he/, the speaker, /had./ And what /they're/ looking into is /not/ the time they /will/ live. 

You'll never meet yourself the way /you/ remember it, he told both boys off-handedly. He squints an eye at them, at the way they're behaving around each other. "Now, me and Wil here kept in touch," and he waves a hand at Franny's almost-twin, "And, yeah, he lives here /now/... But there were /years/ where he didn't... And my son doesn't look like you," he says, nodding at younger Wil. 

Both boy's eyes go round as dinner plates. "He /doesn't/?" 

Older Cornelius half-smiles apologetically. "Just one of those things, I guess. Would you like to meet him? Heck if I know where he is, though. He may be off on his /own/ time-traveling adventure." Eyes still comically big, the boys shake their heads. They're not sure they could handle meeting someone who looked just like /Lewis/, at this point. They might fall in love with /him/, too. 

After bouncing around, chatting with the family, which is largely unchanged except for the addition of Wilbur, who was explained away as a son of Fran's from a future time that ended up not happening - which is perfectly true enough - they wind up back in Cornelius' inventing room. 

Dizzy and head somewhat aching, the younger blond points out the differences he sees between this and the first time he went forward. Cornelius just shrugs with a nod. 

"The one thing I've learned, going /forward/ in time," he imparts to the two of them with a hand on each of their shoulders, feeling as much a father to them as to his /own/ son, "Is that you can never really go forward to that place twice. It's your future from the moment you jump forward, as though you /never/ jump forward. Then when you come back, it all readjusts." He shakes his head. "Much easier to go /backward/. Unless you catastrophically mess something up, you'll go right back to where you started from. But the people you met will never be able to jump forward and visit /you/. They'll visit a version of you, like you're doing now. Basically, people will miss each other. If you really want to hold on, you're going to have to give some things up." He squeezes both of their shoulders, feeling like this is a really important moment for all of them. 

He takes a moment to swallow, wondering if, in a few hours, he's going to wake up in bed beside the 30-year-old Wilbur /he/ knows, and think nothing strange of it at all.


	2. The Ghost of Wilbur's Future

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the following chapter, I use Lewis for the younger inventor, and Cornelius for the older inventor, who never visited an older version of himself when he was young. I also experimented with different spellings of Lewis' nicknames, Louie and Lew being the most common. Wil with just one L is how I write Wilbur's nickname.

(Maybe the ghost idea /is/ a little more plausible. Heck, maybe that's how Wil decides to stay in the 'present' time period. Because he keeps going back to see his friend, Lewis. And he gets curious one day and quizzes his dad, Corny, who doesn't remember shit about being visited by a kid who looks just like his current son. )

That makes Wil worried, of course it does. And when he goes 'home', each time, everything is blurrier. His own memories start to warp and fade and he doesn't see his mother anymore, he sees a person who looks like her male twin, leaning over and touching his father the way his mother always would. And there's the ghost of a woman in the background, growing ever nearer. She plays with the frogs the way his mother would, so he thinks it's her, but /she/ never touches his father. This new ghost talks to his father like he's just her friend. Waving goodbye and occasionally hugging and kissing him once on the forehead. 

It's the moment all three of them are in the same room and his mom's silhouette fades, fuzzes completely into a man's, when the ghost appears more solid than she ever has, that's when Wilbur nearly throws up because the ghost /is/ his mother, definitely, and the man his father now has his arm around turns just enough for Wilbur, tromping down the stairs with a headache, to see - is /himself/.

He flees then, virtually swoops upstairs and apologizes to the person he knocks over on the way - it's one of the several people in a superhero costume, he sees when he looks back to shout /Sorry!/ over his shoulder, thankfully not one of the frail older people he might have accidentally injured - and skids to a halt in front of a machine he has operated now more times than he can count. 

Panting great heaving breaths allows him time to think, and he writes a single note to his dad, to the family at large, thumb-tacking it to the back of his chair where someday someone in the family will see it, and pass the message on to Cor.

A final deep breath punctuates his final moments in his reality and tears escape from the corners of his eyes as he calibrates the machine for a date two hours from when he last left Lewis - and leaps.

It isn't necessary to leap to use the machine, but it felt appropriate at the moment. He's leaving everything behind in one desperate gamble that the future he was seeing take shape before his eyes wouldn't destroy him, wouldn't make him its victim, chew him up with blood-slimed teeth, deaf to his screams. 

Stumbling and collapsing into a heap on the floor, he shuts his eyes against the unfamiliar darkness beyond Lewis' ceiling dome. He's never been here this late before. Was it really only 2 hours ago that the sun was setting? Had he miscalibrated out of nerves? 

Without his permission, his throat starts making hiccuping noises and he whines, thin and high, waking up the boy he'd been sitting beside not so very long ago. How did he get to sleep in just two hours? /Genetics/, he figured glumly, then began giggling hysterically to himself. 

Deeply unsettled at being dragged from sleep by the sound, Lewis shouts from his bed and is only too relieved to hear the giggling stop. However, it means the whining returns, and he's not reassured by /that/ sound, either. His shout of "Who's there?" echoes back to him strangely off the angles of the dome. 

"'M sorry, Lewieeeeee..." a familiar voice pierces the silence, followed by huffles and sniffles and gasps for breath. Lewis isn't sure if Wilbur has asthma, but as with all bad things that happen, there's a first time for everything.

He slides out of bed, not bothering with any lights, and finds a person slumped in an uncomfy-looking position on the ground near the time-portal, which was going through wind-down sequence as he watched. Surprised he managed to sleep through that light-show, Lewis slides to the floor beside the outline of his friend.

"Are you okay? Are you hurt?" The fingers in his hair seem to do nothing to assuage Wilbur's hiccuping, but he claws Lewis's whole arm closer, so Lewis doesn't stop. 

After hiccuping a few times and wiping his running nose on his shirt, then giving up and removing it completely, Wilbur shakes his head morosely with the shirt a wad of fabric before his face and asks, "Can I sleep here to-tonight? With you?"

"You wanna sleep here tonight?" Lewis repeats, not sure he heard that right. Wilbur's /please/ comes through loud and clear. 

Lewis' immediate response is to slide his arms around his friend's torso and carry him over to the bed. 

Wilbur groans gratefully as they shuffle towards the bed, thankfully built large enough for two, since Lucille has more money than she knows what to do with, and spending it to give her newly adopted son a more comfortable and fulfilling life is as good a way as any. 

Wilbur keeps groaning as Lewis rolls over him and wrestles the covers over their legs. Finally, the blond rolls his eyes and turns towards Wilbur's back and slides one arm over his waist. 

"You gonna be an ungrateful houseguest and keep me up all night with your moaning?" he asks sarcastically, a light slap to Wilbur's chest resounding louder than he'd expected, because Wilbur's still not wearing a shirt.

Wilbur clutches Lewis' arm and whimpers, "N-no." 

Lewis sighs and snuggles into his friend's back and kisses the closest part of his head he can reach. "You'd /better/ not. Now, we'll get a good night's sleep and we'll talk about it in the morning, okay?" Wilbur whimpers his assent and wriggles to get more comfortable on Lewis's bed, wearing more clothes than he usually does to sleep. 

The heat of the room evaporates quickly out through the glass dome but Lewis warm at his back is plenty comforting enough to send Wilbur to sleep within the hour. If he has dreams, he doesn't remember them.

They both wake, startled and irritated, when Lewis's alarm goes off before dawn. Wilbur turns away from the noise, clamping his pillow over his head while at the same moment, Lewis rolls towards the noise to turn it off. 

He winds up laying half on top of Wilbur with only a pillow between their heads. He retracts his arm slowly after silencing the small electronic beast, and waits for Wil to relax his death-grip on the pillow. 

When Wil's mussed and crease-smushed face appears from behind the pillow, Lewis smiles a smile Wilbur has /never/ seen on him and lazily traces a finger down the side of his face. 

"Good morning, my sweet dawn songbird," he murmurs with a press of their noses together, repeating a jeer Wilbur once woke him with after a looooong night spent assembling some project or other. 

Wilbur tilts his face up to kiss the young man above him, as natural as breathing, before he comes to his senses and starts attempting to shove Lewis off his still completely naked chest. He should be grateful Lewis didn't drool on him, he begrudingly recognizes. 

His heartbeat only starts really racing once he realizes he cannot simply push Lewis off of him as he has done in the past. This is due to the fact, belatedly realized, that Lewis is far more adamant about staying right where he is than he has been in the past. 

When the pair of them sleep together, especially half-naked, there has always been some hemming and hawing and coughing and muttering and a fair amount of blushing all around. By the time they both scramble down for breakfast, they both pretend it wasn't awkward at all, that they're just that close of friends and they're both totally cool with any homoerotic undertones to their actions because there's clearly nothing underlying to support them. 

However, at this moment, personally lying under his best friend and future father - or not - Wilbur's brain starts to get the message that maybe there were some underlying /somethings/ there, after all. 

"Uh, Louie? You gonna let me up?"

"Do you need to pee?" Lewis counters, as that would be a fair reason.

For some reason unbeknownst to him, Wilbur doesn't lie in this moment. 

"Uhh...no?"

"Then no," Lewis responds, tugging the blankets back up to their waists and settling his chest more heavily on top of Wil's.

"Um. Why?" Wil feels completely justified in asking.

"Well, I'm pretty darn comfortable, /plus/, you just appeared out of nowhere last night, totally incomprehensible and I think crying your eyes out. Unless you were under the influence of some intoxicant..." He trails off to allow Wil to answer.

He huffs, "No," as though he's slightly insulted Lewis would even ask that. The spikes of blond squashed against his chest feel completely alien, yet not unwelcome at all, as Lewis rolls his head lazily against him, apparently as caught up in the novelty as he.

"Then there is a good explanation somewhere in your big, sexy brain, and I think I deserve to hear it." Wilbur winces at their common snippet of banter, wherein sometimes they have whole conversations telling each other how sexy the other is. Pretty much every time, especially in the early days, they would both crack up laughing in very short order. 

After a while, though, it became a shorthand way to express their appreciation and gratitude for the genius the other was capable of. At least, that's what Wil had always /thought/ it had meant...

"It, um. It kind of has to do with that, actually," he admits unhappily to both Lew and himself. 

"What, your big, sexy brain? What kind of trouble has it gotten you into this time?" He doesn't sound surprised, which Wil should be insulted about, but considering his track record....

"Not /trouble/, it's... There was a ghost in my house," he blurts out, just to get it over with.

/That/ makes Lewis lift his head off his friend's chest. 

He looks him straight in the eye and there's no denying that glasses make his face looks different. Wil knows he can barely see him even now, and he allows himself a nervous swallow. 

Lewis feels it, though, in contact with his chest, and pushes up further on his elbows, taking his all-important body heat with him. Wil moans at that and Lewis adamantly inquires, "What do you mean, a /ghost/?" He's going to make /no/ assumptions because /anything/ is possible. He's learned /that/ for a fact, at least, after all this time.

"Urrgh, I'm /going/ to tell you, but first, will you kiss me again?" Wilbur /meant/ to ask for Lewis to lie down on top of him again but it got mangled on the way to his mouth, apparently. 

"Of course," Lewis offers, non-plussed. He tilts his jaw forward and kisses Wil's forehead. "Now what were you talking about?" 

Wil gives an unhappy, "Nnnnrgh," and tosses his head to the side, pride welling up just high enough to hold him back from demanding Lewis do it /right/ this time. He doesn't have to ask, though, because Lewis takes the exposed neck as an /order/ and with a slight exasperated huff at Wilbur's prima donna tendencies, he leans down and places his mouth against the obvious thick tendon and sucks gently.

Wilbur nearly jackknifes a foot off the bed. His hands thrust into Lew's spiky hair on instinct and instinct too leads him to sling his less-trapped leg over top of Lewis' hip and /squeeze/. 

The blond-haired boy slowly eases his mouth off of Wilbur's neck and leans slowly up to look him in the eyes. Sensing the sudden coldness in the room, Wilbur lets his leg slide off and turned slowly more red as the seconds passed. Somewhere, inaudibly, a clock went tick-tock, tick-tock. 

"Sorry," he eventually says, not sure if that'll do him any good, but the perfect silence is impossible to leave alone. 

Lewis blinks purposefully as though to clear his vision and he lifts off of Wilbur's body again. Wil bites his lip this time. Lewis keeps blinking as he decides to slowly roll off of Wil and sprawl on his back with his calf over top of Wil's, their shoulders also touching. 

"So you saw a ghost?" he starts, as though he hadn't heard the apology, as though the last 70 seconds hadn't happened.

Wilbur swallows against his nerves again. "I did. It was... It was my /mom/. Which was odd, cuz, she was /also/ right there. So there were kind of two of her, for a while. But the ghost was /really/ faint, for, for a long time."

"A long time?" Lewis winces at himself. He hadn't meant to interrupt.

"Yeah, at least a few weeks. I thought it was just... I don't know, something explainable? But this time... Last night... I saw that it was /her/, specifically, and my real mom kind of turned into someone else, slowly, going all blurry at the edges. She kissed my dad and I saw... She was /me/." He swallows again and tries to keep his bile down. "It was me, but older, like I was /his/ age, and he was kissing my dad and Mom was acting like she was just a /friend/ or something--" He breaks off because Lew's hand has flown to his mouth and the elbow jabbed him in the ribs. 

"Louie?" he asks hesitantly. This man was literally seconds ago sucking on his neck, why would he be freaked out hearing about the two of them kissing when they were older?

"I'm sorry," is all the younger man could say. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't /know/--" This feels painfully familiar and Wil finds himself shaking his head, rolling onto his side and laying a hand on Lew's far shoulder.

"Hey, hey, hey. Lewis. Lewis Cornelius Robinson. Stop that. Of /course/ you didn't - Look, whatever you did, I forgive you. I mean, it's not your fault some ghost showed up and looked like my mom, is it?" Lewis looks over at him briefly but doesn't move his hand from his mouth and it makes Wil's blood run cold. "Is it?" he asks again, nails digging in.

Lewis looks like he's about to cry, himself, closing his eyes with his hand still covering his mouth, but he manages to lower the hand and start talking. "I didn't know it would do that... I've been... thinking for months. How I'd rather have /you/ here, and /her/ as a friend. She could still be your mother, I'd just--" 

He breaks off then, glancing suddenly at Wil and startling him a tad. "I am so, so glad you got out of there alive," he says in all seriousness and Wil can't hold back a shaky laugh.

"Uhh, hahah. I was never in mortal /danger/ or anything..."

Lewis is shaking his head and tears are falling from his eyes now, but he's paying them no heed so Wil attempts to do the same. "No, no, no, you really were. If I decided that I would never make you--" He turns his head and stares straight back into the loneliest corners of Wilbur's soul. "Then you'd cease to exist. Just like you did when that storm happened. And you wouldn't have come /back./" 

Remembering how it had felt to have pieces of his body split off from each other and drift off into a black hole, Wilbur shudders.

"Yeah. I'm glad I'm not dead, too."

"I wonder if you can never go back..." Lewis muses as he shifts on the bed to better grasp Wilbur to him for a real, serious hug. 

"Mmm," Wil manages as Lew's warm weight comes back to him, only able to think again once it's gone, and even then, not very well. "I left them a letter. The whole family. I, uh. I kinda blamed you, but it was also that, I wanted to live with you, if I had to choose." 

He thrusts his face into the pillow beneath him and grits his teeth against the tears. "I know, it's totally /awful/ of me to /say/ that but I... I /meant/ it. Cor, I /love/ them, but I'd rather be with /you/." 

Wil gasps as Lewis clutches him close with one arm and mutters, "Is it true? Can I really have this? /Everything?/ I thought I'd have to give you up." He barely attempts to wipe his eyes as he pulls back and puts both hands on Wilbur's cheeks. "I thought I'd have to watch you /disappear/ and live with just the memory of you until you were born a squealing baby, like, 15 years from now!" His face is a twisted and tear-streaked mess, but all Wilbur wants to do is kiss it. Moved by the image of all that /waiting/, Wil returns the grasp and nuzzles against Lewis' shoulder. 

"Hey," he manages to say this time, as the silence stretches but does not /hurt/, anymore. "I'd...really like it if you would keep laying on me."

"What?" Lewis asks with a laugh in the word as he releases Wil, searching his eyes. Some of his old self-consciousness is back and Wilbur hates to see it. He swallows and repeats himself.

"I liked it when you laid on top of me. Can you do it again?" Lewis' lips work in a fury of hope and shyness, a smile and a pair of thinned lips appearing by turns. 

Fed up with his lackluster response time, Wilbur growls, "Arrgh, come here, you big dummy," and tries to haul the man over onto his front with both arms, one very awkwardly squished beside him. He doesn't manage, of course, but Lewis gets his act together to help for the last little bit and wiggles to line himself up better. 

Wil lets out a pleased animal noise and winds his arms around Lew, tracing long furrows in the fabric of his t-shirt. 

The warmth and the weight so perfectly distributed, Lewis' pointy hipbones digging into his thighs, make Wilbur squirm from the most delicious kind of self-torture imaginable. 

There's no way Lewis isn't feeling the stiffy digging into his abs, so Wil figures it's just a waiting game until one or the other of them points out the obvious. 

He waits for quite a while longer than he bargained for, only getting stiffer with each rise and fall of Lewis' chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand there's your abrupt, unsatisfying ending! Eheheheh. I dunno what it is about this pairing, they just refuse to let me write them ACTUALLY getting it on... Probably because it's so emotionally exhausting having to deal with the mental breakdowns they always want to have before I can get them into bed together. And then they just wanna sleep. :P


End file.
